Why Car Salespeople Fail – Part One

Over the years I've seen many car salesmen come and go, some with talent and some that didn't have a chance from the beginning. This is the first of a series of posts on why car salespeople fail (and sales women). I am not going to cover the ones that didn't have a chance, but I will talk about the ones that showed real potential but failed nonetheless. They came from all walks of life and from different backgrounds, some of those that I thought would never make it in the beginning are doing well today and others that thought their past experience would serve them well as a car salesman are no longer in the business.

I have put this series of posts together to help you recognize the things you need to change and not to help you make a decision whether or not you should be selling cars for a living. I assume you are in the car business and you are looking for ways to not only sell more cars but to increase your income, hopefully this information will help you achieve a six figure income selling cars. I have coached, mentored and assisted many automobile salespeople over the years and I have found the following 10 items to be the most common reasons why salespeople fail. The reasons are not in any particular order because everyone is different and their reasons aren’t necessarily anyone else's reasons.

There will be times throughout your car sales career that you will question why you are doing this for a living, but that is normal. Especially on those days when the sales manager takes your head off or a customer that you thought was a sure thing blows you off. Bad days, bad weeks and even bad months can happen in the life of the car salesman, but that is no reason to quit because there is great money to be made as a car sales professional.

The 10 Most Common Reasons Car Salesmen Fail

Price of the Car

The price of the car that they are trying to sell has got to be one of the top reasons why car salesmen fail. The car salesman thinks that another $20 a month, $500 on the trade or even another thousand dollar price reduction will sell the car, but usually there is something more to it. Price is rarely the only roadblock that you need to overcome when you can't close the deal. Granted there are those customers that are all about price, but those types of customers are usually less than 10% of the overall volume. When a customer feels good about making the purchase and they feel that they've been treated fairly price isn't nearly as important as you think. Price is what the customer uses because that is the only thing they feel that they have any control over so when a customer says it's all about price it is not really all about price. When the car salesman believes that price is the issue that is usually when they fail to close the deal. This brings us to another reason for failure which is believing the customer and the next item I will cover in the series “Why Car Salespeople Fail”.

A Guest Post by Andrei Smith Car sales is an incredible career path if you are successful. As such, there is an entire market of automotive sales training courses available online that you can pay Read more…